How to Make Strings "Xml Safe"

How do you make strings XML safe?

By either escaping those characters with htmlspecialchars, or, perhaps more appropriately, using a library for building XML documents, such as DOMDocument or XMLWriter.

Another alternative would be to use CDATA sections, but then you'd have to look out for occurrences of ]]>.

Take also into consideration that that you must respect the encoding you define for the XML document (by default UTF-8).

Best way to encode text data for XML in Java?

Very simply: use an XML library. That way it will actually be right instead of requiring detailed knowledge of bits of the XML spec.

How can I make my xml safe for parsing (when it has & character in it)?

I think this an interesting question, because it's a situation that may really happen in real-life. Although I believe that the right thing to do is asking the XML provider to fix the XML and make it valid, I thought one option was trying with a lenient parser. I did some search and I found this blog post talking about this same problem, and suggesting the same solution that I was think of. You may try with jsoup. Let me repeat that I think this is not the best thing to do: you should really ask the XML provider to fix it.

How to encode special characters in XML

You can use HttpUtility.HtmlDecode or with .NET 4.0+ you can also use WebUtility.HtmlDecode

How to write character & in android strings.xml

Encode it:

How to put a - in string.xml file

So, when you read the error message, your answer will be that
you have to replace - with –. Then it should work fine =)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

What characters do I need to escape in XML documents?

If you use an appropriate class or library, they will do the escaping for you. Many XML issues are caused by string concatenation.

XML escape characters

There are only five:

"   "
'   '
<   <
>   >
&   &

Escaping characters depends on where the special character is used.

The examples can be validated at the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Text

The safe way is to escape all five characters in text. However, the three characters ", ' and > needn't be escaped in text:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>"'></valid>

Attributes

The safe way is to escape all five characters in attributes. However, the > character needn't be escaped in attributes:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute=">"/>

The ' character needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ":

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute="'"/>

Likewise, the " needn't be escaped in attributes if the quotes are ':

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid attribute='"'/>

Comments

All five special characters must not be escaped in comments:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<!-- "'<>& -->
</valid>

CDATA

All five special characters must not be escaped in CDATA sections:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<valid>
<![CDATA["'<>&]]>
</valid>

Processing instructions

All five special characters must not be escaped in XML processing instructions:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?process <"'&> ?>
<valid/>

XML vs. HTML

HTML has its own set of escape codes which cover a lot more characters.

How can I escape & in XML?

Use & in place of &.

Change it to:

<string name="magazine">Newspaper & Magazines</string>